Linux Compatibility Tested - Adaptec AHA-294OU

Adaptec AHA-2940U SCSI adapter
(rev .11)
AppLabs
September 9 1999 This document presents the results of the Linux Compatibility test, which included the installation and testing of Caldera OpenLinux 2.2. with the Adaptec AHA-2940U SCSI adapter.
AppLabs' Linux compatibility testing of these components showed the Adaptec AHA-2940U SCSI adapter to be compatible with Caldera OpenLinux 2.2. The Adaptec AHA-2940U SCSI adapter is awarded the AppLabs Linux Compatibility mark.

CARD DETECTION PASS

Comments
After inserting the card and connecting the seagate drive, the machine was posted and a causal inspection of the card's SCSI bios was made. No obvious errors were found.BR>An attempt was made to boot to Caldera's install disk. The drive was partitioned using the fdisk utility that was part of the installation utility. Partitions sda1, sda2, and sda5 were created; 1500MB, 500MB and 40MB respectively. The install program formatted and checked for bad blocks (none were found). A full installation was run from the CD and a general configuration was completed.

DRIVER INSTALLATION PASS

Comments

DRIVE PREP PASS

Comments

FORMAT TEST PASS

Comments

BOTTLENECK TEST PASS

Comments
The bonnie harddrive testing utility was downloaded and uncompressed in the /tmp directory A test file of 370MB was used to avoid any harddrive cache that might skew the test results. According to the bonnie documentation a test file of at least twice the physical memory should be used. The Bonnie results were dumped to a file for later comparison.
ie ./bonnie -s 600 > /mnt/floppy/2940u/onecard.onedrive
The drive was capable of 20MB /sec external transfers but was only doing 5MB /sec . A check of the /var/log/demsg file confirmed that the drive was only loaded on boot in asynchronous mode. Operated in this mode the max possible speed is 5MB /sec according to the drive manufacturer..

MULTIPLE DEVICE TEST PASS

Comments
The IBM 8GB drive was connected to the same card as the Seagate drive. Partitions sdb1,sdb2,sdb2,sdb5 were created using fdisk.Partition sdb1 was formatted and mounted under /mnt/sdb1. The bonnie program was copied there. Simultaneous copies of bonnie were run on the two drives from console 1 and 2. ie
./bonnie -s 600 >/mnt/floppy/2940u/onecard.sda1
./bonnie -s 600 >/mnt/floppy/2940u/onecard.sdb1

MULTIPLE CARD/DRIVES TEST PASS

Comments
a second 2940U card was installed into the machine. and was connected to an 8GB drive. To simply testing the boot drive was attached to the card in the PCI socket with the lowest ID. The bonnie program was then run simultaneously on consoles 1 and 2 form both drives and the results were saved for later comparison. >ie
./bonnie -s 600 >/mnt/floppy/2940u/twocard.sda1
./bonnie -s 600 >/mnt/floppy/2940u/twocard.sdb1

SOFTWARE RAID TEST PASS

Comments
Caldera: No raid tools were included on the Caldera 2.2 CD, mdtools from a previous test were used. For simplicity sake a linear raid was setup for this test. The existence of the md devices in the /dev directory was verified.

Hardware Used for Testing

IBM Mpro Dual Pentium III 500 Mhz with 256 MB RAM. Two SCSI hard drives: IBM PCCO DDRS-39130W supplied with the Mpro as sdb, and a Seagate ST32250W as sda. The drives switched between sdb and sda.

Setup

The installation cdrom was run off the internal IDE controller but no IDE harddrive was used. All software was run directly form the SCSI drives. Unless specifically noted, the test file written by the bonnie test program was 600 Mbytes. The large size was used to avoid any caching.

Additional notes are available describing testing procedures used with this SCSI controller card.

SOFTWARE RAID TEST	PASS
Comments Caldera: No raid tools were included on the Caldera 2.2 CD, mdtools from a previous test were used. For simplicity sake a linear raid was setup for this test. The existence of the md devices in the /dev directory was verified.